


Gunpowder & Ink

by MathildaHilda



Category: Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person, Red Dead Redemption 2 Spoilers, because what else do i write these days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 12:49:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17183309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: You were as lost as Dutch by the end, even if the reasons why were two forks in two different roads and you became the only one to pay the final price.You couldn’t fight change, so you stopped trying.





	Gunpowder & Ink

**Author's Note:**

> An Arthur Morgan character study that has refused to leave my head since I started playing this amazing game.
> 
> It's a little sad, a little messy and a little non-linear, but what else is new about my writing, really? ;)
> 
> Merry (belated) Christmas and a happy new year everyone!

Maybe, if you’d been lucky, it’d been a Mary Morgan writing you letters way back when you were straying the edges of what was considered decent of a man of your upbringing and stature.

Maybe, if you’d been lucky, you’d have died from something other than a bullet or a knife.

Maybe, if you’d been lucky, you’d have died from a different cough in a different time, when stature and grandeur had little to do with any of the things that’re now written nicely in that book of yours where no one else can read ‘em.

 

But when, since you met a certain man with a hat and a penchant for plans that do and don’t work, had you ever been lucky?

 

You were just a kid, fifteen grown and orphaned and with hair as wild as the elderberries growing where only you know, when you saw him and that other feller; smoking and laughing and not yet with voices too rough.

Your father’s hat was far too large and you pushed it up with constant shoves and an easy smile and, later, you’d wonder occasionally, what’d been different if you hadn’t wanted to rob that older feller of his penning pouch and received an earful of shouts and a throbbing cheek in further warning while the other one just laughed.

You’d wonder if maybe then you’d never have met Miss Mary Gillis and seen the other things that the world would cut out just for you. Or, you'd have met her anyway and the circumstances would have set your odds at another level.

But you took what was given you, because a greedy man with everything to lose is a man worth being afraid of and a man not worth pretending to be.

 

Hosea gave you that journal of yours, the first one at least; black and slick and heavy in your palms, way back in the day when you were young and illiterate and brighter than Missus Harris’ kid would ever be. He taught you the right words and the spelling of such as  _pronunciation_ and  _accommodate_ and when there was a difference between  _which_ and  _witch._

(Missus Harris always was a witch, but that didn’t sit well with her boy when spoken aloud, but it always did make the older men laugh.)

You weren’t the one to teach John how to read or write, that was all Dutch and Hosea, but you did try to teach him how to draw.

Truth be told; you were not the best teacher around.

 

You became a sharpshooter at sixteen, freckled and dirty and steady hands, and you learned long ago that a bullet can make as much difference as the move you make on a lady in a bar.

Someone taught you how to make your own bullets, how to take apart your own gun and love it and force it into your command, but no one ever taught you how to be a kid. You were a man before your father was dead and the only kid you ever saw that was untouched by the hatred you spewed, was Isaac.

(Not even little Jack Marston was untouched by it, no matter how hard any of you tried to hide.)

Little Isaac, with eyes so bright and hair just as wild as yours, but with a mother who combed it back and made him laugh until there were tears in his eyes and an ache in between his ribs.

But your hatred caught up with him, and all you had to show for it was two wooden crosses on an empty hill.

(You missed them, but you didn’t tell anyone that. Not even Dutch.)

 

You didn’t kill your first man until you were seventeen, a little less freckled and a little less starved and a little tamer than back when you were eleven. You’d always lived on the wrong side of the law, but learning that the dead fool by your feet was a lawman, makes as much a difference as one might think.

 

You grew older, twenty-two and with scars no one but Dutch could see, when you stared down a kid with a hefty attitude and eyes not bright enough for twelve and a throat still waiting on a noose that wouldn’t tighten just yet. He was your brother in more ways than one, you decided this early on, and you left it at that until your heart dropped and he disappeared into the world for a year.

He came back, older and not a lick wiser, still your brother in more ways than one, but one of the ways dropped somewhere along the road and was replaced by the scars across his mouth.

You didn’t tell him what you felt when you saw him bleeding out in knee deep snow on top of a mountain.

You didn't have to. John Marston always had a way of knowing your mind when you never quite knew it yourself.

  
(He disappears one more time, before the end, and this time, you let him.)

 

When Downes coughed in your face and filled your nose with the smell of blood and that copper taste on your tongue, you thought nothing of it more than that the poor fool would be gone soon enough.

It didn’t matter, you decided then, because you still got your money and for once you didn’t have to kill for it.

(It didn’t matter until much later, when it did.)

 

You’d been shot, trapped, stabbed, drowned and God knows what else, and yet it was a simple cough that brought tears to your eyes and blood to your hands and that final notion that ‘ _this will be my end’_ to your mind.

You’d always been called the cleverer out of Dutch’s boys, but it took you too damn long to see the signs.

You were as lost as Dutch by the end, even if the reasons why were two forks in two different roads and you became the only one to pay the final price.

You couldn’t fight change, so you stopped trying.

 

Micah became the one who made the final choice. Not you.

But it’s an easy choice; you die either way.

You’ve never been in control of anything that’s happened to you, and you didn’t expect to be given a choice in the matter of your own death.

But you’d never expected the choice to become Micah’s.

Your lungs are black as soot, or so they say, and your throat burns from the pain of living and you're almost surprised when your hands aren’t covered in ash by the time the coughs are gone, and blood is all that’s left behind.

(You're almost surprised when there's no scorched skin where the fever burns hottest.)

There’s just enough gunpowder and fire and smoke to kill you, both inside and out, and so you don’t blame Micah for pulling or shift the knife between trained fingers or even when he shouts and walks away.

(The deal is sealed when Dutch walks and then it doesn’t matter anymore.)

But you would have done the same and not done it any differently.


End file.
